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cold fjord writes with this excerpt from the Weekly Standard: "A portion of the website of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) was apparently hacked as long as two months ago. SAMHSA is an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). HHS also runs the new Obamacare insurance marketplace, Healthcare.gov. Dozens of pages hawking retail merchandise have been uploaded to the SAMHSA site, ranging from NFL jerseys to Ugg shoes to Armani fragrances. ... Shortly after this story was posted, the site nace.samhsa.gov returned an error message saying that the site could not be found. Later, the following message appeared on the site (misspelling included): 'This site is undgoing maintenance. We are sorry for any inconvenience this has caused you.'" (Screenshots in the story; Cached example from Google.)"

No matter how it happened I think there is a bit of explaining that needs to be done regarding how a government agency's servers were used to sell consumer goods for two months. Nobody noticed? Really? Almost as interesting is either nobody reported it, or nobody took action on the reports. Once against, more explanations are needed.

This phrase makes no sense, so I'm going to try using it in a sentence to see if I understand it correctly.

Yesterday someone calling himself a capitalist/god-worshipper/communist killed someone. I think that puts proof to the lie that activist capitalists/god-worshippers/communists are improving the world. They're not. They're murderers, just like all other capitalists/god-worshippers/communists.

At what point do we get past every cracked website being "news for nerds, stuff that matters"? It's not. It's either a criminal matter or it's a story of negligence or incompetence. This might have been a story in 1999, but today it certainly doesn't qualify as the slightest bit interesting in any technical way. Similarly, news about US government employees and websites,... it's not news for nerds. It may well be important to many/. readers who live in the USA. It might even have some significance as World

Anyone who isn't addicted to American consumerism is mentally ill. This perfectly normal retail portion of the website helps Americans recovering from substance abuse by encouraging them to spend all their money on shiny crap instead.

A link to the right-wing near-tabloid "The Weekly Standard", calls the PPACA "Obamacare", assumption that HHS doesn't have multiple teams / varying levels of security and monitoring based on site importance, implication that a single hacked site somehow implies the entire department of Health and Human Services is incompetent.

No, their opinion doesn't count because they believe that soy products make you gay (in the case of WorldNetDaily) and because they believe it's possible to be a socialist and a crony capitalist at the same time in the case of all the others.

Not all opinions are equal, and there are not two sides to every story. You understand that, right?

Strange and implausible as it may seem, "hock" means selling your wares to a pawnshop, and "hawk" means selling your wares to the public. I know, I know, it makes no sense, but there it is, the strange and wonderous beauty of the english language in full flight.

Sounds very familiar, this exact same link-spam has been hitting./ for a couple of years now. Usually several postings from one user, somewhat individualized posts. I just moderate all posts by that user -1 troll and they disappear from sight/site. Whack-a-mole for sure, but at least the spamming becomes less visible/effective.

Inserting actual sales pages is far more than just link spam. I run several sites, including blogs and forums and deal with link spammers every day. This required either a software exploit, or a human one (social engineering/inside man).

With the impending and now current government shutdown, HHS clearly just decided to dedicate a portion of their site to selling merchandise in an attempt to partially self-fund their operations. I say well done, HHS.